HINCKLEY’S outspoken representative at the European Parliament says looters and arsonists should be shot on sight by police.

While politicians are scratching their heads in the House of Commons as to how to deal with the riots, Tory MEP Roger Helmer has offered his controversial opinion on Twitter.

On Tuesday, the day after rioters set fire to buildings across London and looted high streets, Mr Helmer, MEP for East Midlands, decided to post on the microblogging site as to how he would deal with the offenders.

He said: “Memo to COBRA: Time to get tough. Bring in the Army. Shoot looters and arsonists on sight.”

The riots began in Tottenham on Saturday after the family of Mark Duggan, who was shot by police, protested outside a police station demanding answers. It soon spilled out of control and officers found a riot on their hands which continued over two more nights in London and then across the country.

It led to David Cameron cutting his holiday and returning home to head a meeting of emergency committee, COBRA.

On Tuesday night gangs of hooded youths caused sporadic damage in Leicester city centre, leading to 14 arrests.

This is not the first time Mr Helmer has courted controversy.

In May he said that victims of sexual crimes should bear some responsibility for what has happened to them. He defined rape into two categories - “classic stranger rape” and “date rape” and imagined a scenario for date rape.

In the blog he said: “Imagine that a woman voluntarily goes to her boyfriend’s apartment, voluntarily goes into the bedroom, voluntarily undresses and gets into bed, perhaps anticipating sex or naively expecting merely a cuddle. But at the last minute she gets cold feet and says ‘Stop!’. The young man, in the heat of the moment, is unable to restrain himself and carries on.”

He goes on to say: “The victim surely shares a part of the responsibility, if only for establishing reasonable expectations in her boyfriend’s mind.”

In January he tweeted that homosexuality was something to be treated like a mental illness. He said: “Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to ‘turn’ a consenting homosexual?”